Matthew B. Crawford is an American writer and research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
Early life and education Crawford majored in physics as an undergraduate, then turned to political philosophy. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago.
Career In September 2001, Crawford accepted a position as executive director of the George C. Marshall Institute,George C. Marshall Institute, September 2001 press release (web archive) (accessed October 10, 2010) but left the institute after five months,Carolyn Mooney, "A Hands-On Philosopher Argues for a Fresh Vision of Manual Work", The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2009. Web version saying that "the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank."Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, pp. 108–109, Penguin Press, 2009.
he is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, a contributing editor at The New Atlantis, and professes to be a motorcycle mechanic.
In film Crawford appeared in the 2014 documentary Merchants of Doubt.
Selected works Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Penguin Press, 2009. . Published in London as The Case for Working with Your Hands. Viking, 2009. . The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, William Morrow, 2020.
References
Further reading
External links Feature-length radio interview with KGNU Claudia Cragg on 'Shop Class as Soul Craft'